Assemblage and critical urbanism

This paper offers a discussion of what assemblage thinking might offer critical urbanism. It seeks to connect with and build upon recent debates in City (2009) on critical urbanism by outlining three sets of contributions that assemblage offers for thinking politically and normatively of the city. First, assemblage thinking entails a descriptive orientation to the city as produced through relations of history and potential (or the actual and the possible), particularly in relation to the assembling of the urban commons and in the potential of ‘generative critique’. Second, assemblage as a concept functions to disrupt how we conceive agency and critique due to its focus on sociomaterial interaction and distribution. Third, assemblage, as collage, composition and gathering provides an imaginary of the cosmopolitan city, as the closest approximation in the social sciences to the assemblage idea. The paper is not an attempt to offer assemblage thinking as opposed, intellectually or politically, to the long and diverse traditions of critical urbanism, but is instead an examination of some of the connections and differences between assemblage thinking and strands of critical urbanism.